Every good and evil that always dwells in every city was there also, but this city was definitely much more beautiful, more widely build, more cultured and well-organized than the city he has lived from his 14th to 16th year.

(112)

(inside stones)

Then he proceeded to other places and moved into the mountains again, away from the buzz of civilization. He thought about what the philosophers of his books called ‘deliverance’, ‘nirvana,’ ‘moksha,’ eternal immortal freedom and happiness. His whole life he had been yearning for happiness and freedom – that is why he had studied and traveled so much – it gave him the feeling of unlimited freedom and experience, and he encountered happiness after happiness. Not all things were ‘unlimited freedom’ though. Sometimes he was tired when he actually wanted to walk on, or so cold that it would be irresponsible to not seek a hiding place. Also he was not always happy, because he had doubts in his mind about almost everything, and he saw many people who were definitely not happy. Also he realized that one day, far in the future he hoped, he would die and could not take the happiness he was now seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling and tasting with him because he would have no more physical sense organs. They would simply not be there when he was dead and had no more body. Perhaps there was nothing after dying, though he could hardly imagine that; but philosophically it seemed a possible option.

So far he lived mainly in his senses, including occasionally his clairvoyant senses, and in his mind. He decided to do some happiness experiments. He could do so by identifying himself completely with a natural object, and at the same time stopping his thoughts. That wasn’t easy though, because thoughts seem to ever go on, day and night, whether awake or in dreams. If he thought, ‘I don’t want to think,’ that was a thought in itself, so that didn’t work. He realized that stones could not think, so that if he would identify himself with a stone, his human mind would be left behind, and he would be just experience, nothing else, only the experience of being a stone. Every different type of stone feels different if you hold it in your hand, or sit or stand on it. Once he knew a stone, the force of his imagination was enough to do the experiment. For example, he had felt that a particular stone was semi-opaque green inside, not crystal clear, and also not crystallized into big crystals – rather like triple toned green milk, but then of solid matter. He thought of the stone, imagined himself to be in the stone, and then suddenly was inside the stone. The world was green on all sides. There were no sounds, no smells, no thoughts, and also no thoughts about the absence of these. But there was an awareness of vastness, amazing infinite vastness, of green without the name ‘green’, but clear like a starry heaven, and even the heaven and the stars were green. In fact the stars were the atoms of the stone, and there distances were enormous, but the rationality to think of that was gone of course. There was no awareness of time, nor of anything thinkable by a mind, or perceptible by human feelings – nevertheless there was awareness, happiness of a nonhuman kind, eternal peace and perfection it seemed, but not the type of peace that comes from the absence of turmoil. it was a peace without an opposite, both spiritual and immensely ancient – a peace from before the existence of humanity and all moving life-forms. Nothing seemed to move, but deep within there was an almost sleeping expectation, a sleeping will, a sleeping desire.

Shano had not realized before he started how dangerous his experiment was. Because he had lost all awareness of mind and will and desire, he could have been that stone forever, at least millions or billions of years. He would be dead for the world, and even more than dead for himself. There was just green space, infinite green, without contrast with other colors – though some of the green atom-stars seemed to twinkle imperceptibly with all other colors. He could not say whether it was consciousness or unconsciousness.

Had it not been in Shano’s good fate, he might have stopped his evolution for ages – but whether there has ever been someone who did not have such good fate I don’t know. I can not imagine. A human is a human after all, and has something greater than a stone-soul. But dangerous it was for sure. Shano was protected though by his humanness, by his chosen destiny and after a time woke up fine, and was himself again. It had been a great learning experience, he thought, something to be repeated with other stones. He now ‘understood,’ had ‘perceived’ at least something of mineral consciousness, and it had evoked in him a great feeling of nature’s brotherhood. Now he knew that stone was living, ensouled being, that can be some kind of ‘happy’ and perhaps ‘unhappy,’ and that it had the potential for further evolution of its soul. Would a stone-soul ever become a human soul? Their souls had something in common, even now.

He tried the same experiment with a ruby-like transparent stone with large crystals. The feeling was completely different. It was, of course, stone-feeling, and red instead of green, and more transparent, and limited by the crystal surfaces inside the stone, but is was like being linked to another star or planet in heaven, it had a very different character compared to the green opaque stone and different energies were flowing inside. It was definitely a mineral, not of course a plant or another class of creature, but entirely different also. Shano, when back to his human awareness, realized that all was alive, all belonged to the same essence or source, but also that all was unique, different, had something very distinguishable of its own what would always remain with it, perhaps into eternal future, he thought, and that no two things in the universe were ever exactly alike in character. But it was all beautiful and rich of consciousness beyond mental comprehension. He was so happy.

He did several more of such experiments, not only with minerals, but also with plants. Some plants had still much in common with minerals, but much more complex and varied. Moreover they had something extra. In minerals movement and development were only potential, and if they move it is not by their own force and rather was like a sleeping, unconscious expectation, but plants had vitality besides, lifelines, some awakened awareness of an outer world, and a innate desire to react to and direct themselves towards the outside world. In a sense they could communicate with the outer world, at least the more developed of them. They had some awareness of the feelings of other beings, though they didn’t perceive them as ‘other,’ because they had not yet developed an individuality. So for them feeling was ‘holistic,’ and they never experienced any feeling as ‘other.’ But they could distinguish between ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant,’ could perceive shocks in the environment, some even had developed organs of defense, like spines, because of their possibility of distinction between pleasant and unpleasant. They just followed the path of their necessity though, without thinking about it. There were even plants, no doubt the bodies of the highest plant souls, who had, from an innate ‘sexual’ awareness in beauty, adjusted their forms to insects visiting them, sometimes even mimicking their forms and smells and chemical emanations. We know these plants as orchids. And the insects, from their side, had reacted to that. Their forms had intelligently adjusted themselves to their innate desire and destiny, while we realize that plants and insects possess no self-conscious intelligence of their own. Still, they perceive, they ‘know,’ they desire, and make use of an intelligence which is subject to their wishes – even if these wishes are ‘evil’ from human point of view, as with parasites. It could not be just the intelligence of a good God, Shano thought, nor of a universal Devil (because then everything in nature would be evil, as some biologists in the still dark twentieth century believed). Mind and will, wish and skill, are one in nature, and together serve a will or purpose beyond their own understanding. This last applies to humans as much as to minerals, plants, animals and whatever creatures, including gods perhaps. Shano could hardly bear the beauty of his own thoughts when working out his experimental experiences. He lived inside different kinds and species of plants, herbs. shrubs, trees, even a lichen and a moss, dry desert plants and plants growing in small mountain ponds. Plants in their flowering stage and in their fruit bearing stage, young plants and old plants. All were different in mood, in inner feeling and awareness, in their typical energies, in abundance or in their withdrawal. There was of course a relation between their form, flowers and fruits and their inner being. The outside was greatly a mirror of the inside. All plants had a heart and a secret. Still, all the refined types of feelings plants can have he recognized as subtle feelings which had always existed inside himself, but only now he became really aware of them. It was a joy. He felt emotionally richer as a human being, and more vital.

Then, one morning he woke up. He was gloomy, depressive. He missed something. He didn’t know what.

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Quote:

If theosophy has one natural enemy against which it has fought and will always fight it is the materialistic view of life, the view that nothing exists except dead unconscious matter and that the phenomena of life and thought and consciousness spring from it.

- G de Purucker - Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy p. 65-66.

(foreign terms see Glossary above right)

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